Tuesday, May 16, 2017

The Best Ways To Bypass Geo-Restrictions

If you’ve ever travelled to certain countries outside of the US and tried to access your Netflix account, or tried to use BBC iPlayer outside of her majesty’s jurisdiction, you may have hit a wall and found that you couldn’t access the service, simply because of the geographical location. Geo-restrictions can be a real thorn in your side when you’re outside of your home country, but they’re not something you have to just accept! Here are some effective ways of bypassing geo-restrictions.

Using a Smart DNS Proxy

DNS tunnelling is one of the easiest ways to bypass geo-restrictions and access all the media and websites you want to. Hulu, Netflix, and similar services use your device’s IP to tell whether or not you’re in a geo-restricted area, and in turn lock you out of the services you’ve been using. The quickest way around this is using a smart DNS proxy to mask your IP address. This will prevent Netflix and other sites from discovering your real address, or make it appear as if you’ve requested a given service from the US, or wherever you were able to use it before. While these tend to offer better browsing speeds than the alternatives, some can be fronts for phishing scams, so be careful!

Using a Virtual Private Network (VPN)

Linking your device up to a virtual private network is one of the most popular methods of getting around geo-restrictions, and avoiding location errors when you’re browsing the web. They’re more commonly used by businesses that want to keep their data secure, but are becoming more and more widely used by private individuals who simply want to get around these restrictions, or ensure a greater degree of privacy when browsing the web. They’ll encrypt and then route all of your traffic through a server of your choice, and regularly change your IP to prevent DNS hijacking and similar threats. Due to their reliability and high degrees of security, VPNs are often espoused by cybersecurity blogs like Secure Thoughts as the go-to method of getting around geo-restrictions. The only big drawback of VPNs is their effect on browsing speed. Although the high encryption assures that your web activities are going to be safe from prying eyes, pages are going to be pretty slow to load, which can obviously get very frustrating.

Using Proxy Servers

These achieve more or less the same function as a smart DNS proxy, but work in a slightly different way. Rather than masking your IP to get around geo-restrictions, proxy servers act as middlemen of sorts between your device and the internet, and sources any given geo-restricted content for you. To the powers that be, your device will appear to be accessing the proxy, rather than the restricted materials. Just remember that proxies listening on common ports like 80 and 1080 won’t get you far when trying to access Netflix and similar services abroad. To get all your favourite shows, you’ll need one that listens on rarer ports like 8000.